You’re Thinking Like A Marketer, Not A Customer

If you’re running a site to promote something (a product, an event, a way-of-life), and you’re doing so not simply out of the goodness of your heart,* but for financial gain, chances are you’re doing it totally wrong.

And if you are doing it wrong (and you probably are, trust me), then you’re losing money, losing audience, and losing sight of what makes your product/event/philosophy remarkable.

Nine times out of ten, the big problem is that you’re thinking from the point of view of a Marketer rather than as a customer. It’s nothing new to say this, of course, but I wonder if you could recognize it when you see it.

This is one of the biggest signs, and it turns people away before they’ve even had time to figure out where they are:

A homepage that screams “Buy This Now!,” instead of posing a polite, quiet, “How can I help you find what you’re looking for?” or even, “Hi! How are you today? Please feel free to take a look around and let me know if you have any questions.”

There’s a reason that brick-and-mortar salespeople** and cashiers and waitstaff and receptionists and pretty much everyone else use polite language like that above. They are there to serve you and assist you in paying for what you want to buy, not shove the Bison Burger Special down your throat.

Consider this bit of analogy:

It is raining. Hard. You don’t have an umbrella, but need to walk another twenty blocks down Fifth Avenue to get to your job interview. Crossing 36th Street, you glimpse a rack of umbrellas inside a store you’ve never shopped in before, a place called Jerry’s Stuff On Fifth. Sweet. Salvation. You open the door. *Ringaling!* You step inside, casually scanning the room from side to side to locate the rack of umbrellas you had noticed through the window, as you shake off a little of the rainwater and try to calm your breath. Without warning, you are ambushed by sales associates on either side, yelling and arm-waving and shoving Plastic Thermoses in front of your face.

“$9.95! Two for $15!!! Tell A Friend!!! Buy Now! Buy Now! $9.95! Two for $15! Only today! Special Special!”

You try to speak: “But...but...I just want an um—”

“Thermos Special! Buy Today! $9.95! Two for $15!”

If you don’t go running back out into the thunderstorm after enduring that, then I’ll eat my shorts. (Oh wait, I already did that.)

Make sense yet?

Here’s a translation of my little allegory:

Rain = Google

Umbrella = Search Query

Jerry’s Stuff On Fifth = Your Website

Plastic Thermoses Salespeople Of Doom = Bullshit Links and Flashing Banners and Fancy Rollovers and Embedded Commercials and BUY NOW MOTHERFUCKER Buttons that have absolutely, positively, NOTHING to do with what your customers want because you haven’t even bothered to ask them.

Any questions?

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*Of course, even people doing stuff out of the goodness of their hearts routinely make the same mistakes. But the stakes are frequently higher when money gets involved, and for some reason, folks working for-profit tend to approach things with a much higher dose of ego, self-deception, and propensity for outright lying and other unethical behaviors that basically define “Marketers.” (Sub-note: marketers are not intrinsically evil. Marketers (capital M) are.) Go Back Up

**I am aware that a lot of salespeople are assholes. These are not the ones I am referring to. Have you stopped to think that your site acts like the very worst of the worst Timeshare salespeople? Go Back Up

What CMS Do You Use?

It might be one of the oldest questions on the web (surely the topic of some long-running flame wars), but I’m curious, so I’m asking: What Content Management System do you use?

Some backstory: I’ve recently begun working at a New York-based web design and Internet marketing firm as their all-around design/development guy, and a big part of what I’m bringing to the company is expertise outside of Flash-based development (which is really common in the industry for which my company does work), and some really old-school Dreamweaver-generated table-based designs.

I’m there to push CSS, standards-based stuff, flexibility, and implement solutions that push the industry forward in terms of accessibility, usability, and efficiency. It’s an uphill climb, to be sure (can you climb downwardly?), but one that is fulfilling, and for which noticeable progress is already being made. In a way, I’m as much a consultant as a site-builder, and that suits me just fine.

Now, one thing I’ve been trying to figure out is how best to approach issues of content management for our clients, particularly new ones.

The way I see it, there are several different possibilities:

1. Having the client (or content manager) purchase and use commercial CMS software like Adobe Contribute or Dreamweaver.
   
2. Purchasing and installing a web-based CMS (something PHP-y, ideally, since I’m capable with that).
3. Using Wordpress, Drupal, or similar open-source Content Management Systems.
4. Building a custom CMS from the ground up.
5. Implementing services like the new CushyCMS, which is a totally hosted content management service that now offers a premium version for designers that allows you to create a branded CMS and bill clients monthly, if desired.
6. Award all clients a complimentary copy of HTML For Dummies upon completion of their site and change the office phone numbers.

A few of my thoughts on the above possibilities, and then I’d love love love your input and suggestions:

• I’m inclined to hate Dreamweaver and Contribute (I think they violate my religion, perhaps). And I think there’s a great deal to be said about the ability to update one’s site from anywhere with an internet connection - without having to install expensive software.
• Non-free web-based CMSes: I know they exist, but I don’t know which ones are good. Why use these rather than their free counterparts?
• I’ve used Wordpress in the (recent) past for client sites, and I like it enough, but it doesn’t seem meant to handle “real websites.” I don’t mean this as an attack on its particular technical merits (though the Digg crowd surely does), but merely as a comment on what I gather to be its “software worldview,” if I may coin a phrase with only 283 results in Google.
• I have yet to use Drupal, though I’ve been researching it, and it seems viable.
• We don’t have the capabilities in-house to develop custom Content Management Systems aside from very exceptional cases for which we can have a pretty cool Rails developer to put something together for us, so that’s pretty much out, and beyond the financial abilities of most of our clients, besides.
• And CushyCMS intrigues me, and seems really great for smaller clients, but the idea of relying on third-party hosting scares me a little. How do you tell your clients, “There’s nothing we can do about it?”

Ultimately, I’m curious to hear what you use, what makes it awesome (or makes it suck), and what you know about the different options out there for folks looking to build some seriously cool sites, and spread some seriously decent standards-compliance at the same time.

Let me know in the comments!

The 2008 Gmail Appeal

Email Standards Project - Gmail Grimaces from Mathew Patterson on Vimeo.

More on the Email Standards Project (from me).

Kentucky GRILLED Chicken?

Are you kidding me?

This is Dunkin Donuts all over again